The Outer Worlds - Obsidian's new RPG

Hm. The lack of a third-person camera and the radio are a bit saddening. I'm totally down with having a reputation system, though, Obsidian always does those nicely. And of course, it's great that you can kill or not kill everyone. No Essential tag around.

The idea of companions being permanently killable on harder difficulties is interesting. I can see a lot of people being pissed about it, but I think it's a nice addition.

The first and third points would seem to go hand in hand — hopefully someone mods in radio. I mean, maybe the in-game score will be good as well, but it just seems strange to play a first-person Fallout-like without radio.

I'm less interested in New Game+ than post-endgame play with this sort of game. Neither one would be a dealbreaker for me, though.

Reputation system's much more interesting and functional than karma anyway, I'm good with that.

I guess I can understand balance-wise why they might limit the number of flaws/perks you can take, but I have to admit I'm disappointed. I wanted to run a character who was as neurotic as possible. Even 5-8 would be better than just 3-5.

The radio would be nice to have, but I could care less about third person. I'm always relieved to find out I can play a game in first person, especially since most developers seem to favor third person nowadays.

"Tactical Time Dilation". So, it appears this game is going to have VATS, but actually good. Your move, Bethesda.

No kidding, I actually had an idea for how Bethesda ought to fix VATS and it resembles something like this very closely. Instead of taking control away from the player and having them watch a brief cutscene, actually have the player line up their shots as they normally do and let shots apply status effects based on the limb you shoot.

Reminds me of that stop-time effect in Prey when you were aiming your psychic Typhon powers, albeit expanded on a bit more. Instead of time freezing entirely, it will slow down, and your "action point" pool will drain depending on if you're moving or attacking. I think this is an excellent compromise between the immersion and combat of first-person shooters and the tactics of classic RP Gs, miles ahead of the clunky VATS system.

I doubt Obsidian is intentionally thumbing their nose at Bethesda- they couldn't have predicted the colossal trainwreck that is Fallout 76 after all- but it does start to feel a bit like that given the confluence of events.

The announcement trailer did have a bit of fun at the expense of Bethesda - "By the original creators of Fallout", a short few weeks after 76 flopped onto the market - but since then, I still think it's mostly Obsidian doing what they're good at and overshadowing Bethesda by accident as a result.

I wonder if the game's actual shooting will be good. The 3D Fallout games have always been at the mercy of the fact that their shooting was a bit poor, which required VATS to make it bearable. It'd be nice if TOW's shooting didn't rely on that as much.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Feb 12th 2019 at 6:37:19 PM

Fourthspartan56Technocratic Progressive
from Georgia, US
Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!

Makes sense. They've never been that confrontational about these things. And I can see the whole thing being accidental, then blown out of proportion by the fans who, at that point, were already pissed at Bethesda anyways. It'll probably peak once the game hits the market, too. People will be comparing it to the modern Fallout games one way or another. It's nice to see that Obsidian isn't taking potshots, though.

Fourthspartan56Technocratic Progressive
from Georgia, US
Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!

I think it was an obvious move to play up the Fallout connections — the game's seemingly very much designed to appeal to the kind of player who enjoyed New Vegas, and Cain and Boyarsky are recognisable names to RPG players and Fallout is their most well-known and mainstream creation. So of course you'd mention the connection as a selling point! But seeing it as an obvious jab at Bethesda was probably something fans projected onto it (especially with FO76 making the headlines with various bugs and controversies).

Anyway, just to wrap up this week's news, Game Informer talked a bit about science weapons. They're deliberately over-the-top with little thought given to realism, and are more off the beaten path and rare compared to regular weapons. They scale with your Science skill, so the hope is they'll provide some more options in combat to tech-focused characters compared to more regular combat-oriented builds. Every item also has a level, so if you are using them you'll probably want to upgrade them. There are five in all: a light melee, heavy melee, handgun (a shrink ray), long gun, and heavy gun. Cain suggested maybe releasing DLC of more of them, if they proved popular.

The other feature was talking about the choices they're trying to enable in the game. According to the article, you can achieve objectives in different ways, but there aren't wildly diverging paths or anything. 'Our story structures look like footballs, where there are all these points that everybody will pass through.' They use an example of having to get a power regulator for your ship — every player has to get one, but there's more than one out there and how you personally go about getting a specific one can be different. They don't want choices to just boil down to obvious good/evil. They talk a little more about hybrids and Leader builds, though I don't think there's any strictly new information there. I'm curious as to the exact mechanics for the latter — they've talked about using companion skills in the place of your own to switch playstyle on the fly, but I haven't come across much specific details.

Anyway, in interviews and stuff they've warned that they don't want people getting their hopes too high; time and budget were considerations in making the game and it's not open-world. They described it, roughly, to a smaller KotOR II in size.

Being smaller is perfectly fine by me. In my experience the likelihood of replay goes down the more the amount of game time goes up. I can't even begin to imagine replaying some of the 120+ hour open-world games that are out now. KOTOR 2? I played that at least 3 times thru before installing the expansion mod.

I did enjoy Odyssey, but the developers were like "Yeah, you can go back and replay your choices!" when most of the important choices were small subtle moments over the entire game. Reloading your last save five minutes ago is one thing. But when you have to reload a save from fifty hours ago to get a different ending, you may as well just replay the whole game—and it's way too much for a casual replay.

I think one of the things that makes Odyssey so bad is that every single point of interest is marked on the map from the start, and you're shown when you finish them. It makes it feel like you need to complete them all—or at least complete every one you happen to run into. It was a lot easier to ignore locations in New Vegas, or even Fallout 4, because you're doing something else or just don't find the location interesting.

@The Lovecraftian Ironic that first person makes your head ache. I get the same thing from third person. Makes me feel all dizzy, like I’m constantly spinning around. It really would be ideal if they’d just let us choose which one we prefer.

Huh. Wonder why that is. I know my problem with first person: field of view. Some games, like Dishonored, certain Call of Duty games and Far Cry give me a headache after a while, but others, like the Fallout games, Portal or Half-Life, never did. I'd never seen a similar problem with third person, though.

But yeah, being given the choice would be nice, especially given all the parallels this game already has to Fallout.

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